July 30, 2010

Here is part 2 of my profile on Spiritualized (again, this was published in edited form by “Goldmine Magazine” sometime in October 1997; you can read part 1 here). Don’t forget tonight is the night they play their 1997 album Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Spacein its entirety with choir and orchestral backup live, on-line, via Facebook tongiht! Accept their RSVP to make sure you do not miss it. It will be historic! Now on with part 2 of the profile….

When trying to explain the power of his music on people, specifically fans who burst into tears at performances, Pierce says, “We get extreme reactions because we deal with extreme issues. We’re not dealing with any mid-ground. I think those things have been there since Lazer Guided Melodies, or since Spacemen stuff, and we’ve always said we deal with the highest highs and the lowest lows. It’s not some kind of music that’s dealing with some kind of mediocrity, and I think when you’re dealing with those kinds of issues in music then the reaction to the music is quite out there as well. And I think that’s why I can kind of say ‘Hey, I’m feeling kind of down today,’ and I can write ‘Broken Heart,’ or say, ‘Hey, this is exciting stuff,’ and I can write ‘Electricity.’”

References to Jesus Christ and God have appeared in Pierce’s lyrics since his days in Spacemen 3. He explains that those references aren’t necessarily supposed to be interpreted as literal allusions to Christianity. Once again, something deeper lies behind the implications. “I think it’s a way of getting people to understand that kind of thing,” he says, “like ‘Walking With Jesus.’ People understand the message of that song. It’s just getting people to understand what that kind of feeling is about. It’s not necessarily Jesus. It’s kind of like normal morality or a kind of societal morality. I think people really, genuinely think that I’ve been walking around with Jesus on my right-hand or left-hand side.”

It’s no surprise that the carefully constructed and deeply moving music of Spiritualized has spawned a devout following of fans that pick up every scrap of Spiritualized’s releases that has crossed over from Pierce’s days in Spacemen 3, which also had quite a cult following that continues to grow since its demise in 1989. Between the lag of albums, Spiritualized have released exclusive items to fans and a multitude of EPs that often offer sneak previews to the follow-up albums. Pierce has no trepidations about releasing early versions of songs to the public. “I guess we do that because they evolve into something more,” he says. “I’d rather the ideas are more realized sometimes before they come out, but, also, it’s good for people to get earlier versions, like demo versions, or earlier kind of ideas of songs.”*

Nothing is sacred for Pierce. He also believes some of the music he’s done in Spacemen 3 can still be developed into something new. He re-recorded “Feel So Sad,” from Spacemen 3’s final album, Recurring, and released it as an early Spiritualized single. “So Hot (Wash Away All of My Tears)” from the 1988 Spacemen 3 album, Playing With Fire, was re-recorded by Spiritualized as “All of My Tears” on Pure Phase. “It’s still relevant,” Pierce says about the new versions of older songs. “I still play some of that stuff live. We still play ‘Walking With Jesus.’ They’re all still relevant now, and they’re relevant to what we do, so it’s not like that’s old stuff or some stuff that doesn’t mean anything anymore. I think it still has the same, universal message. I don’t think there’s ever going to be a time when songs like ‘Broken Heart’ or ‘Cool Waves’ don’t have a message.”

Though some of the music of his Spacemen 3 days still matters to him, Pierce doesn’t really stay in touch with any of the former members of the group. “No, not at all,” he says. “I haven’t seen any of them for about five years.” Pierce immediately goes back to his memory of the break-up, saying, “I wasn’t quite content with how things were going, and it just became cabaret. It became doing ‘Revolution’ twice, nightly, and I didn’t want to do it.”

He admits to having heard some of the new music from the his fellow off-shoots of Spacemen 3, including Spectrum, which is fronted by Sonic Boom, a.k.a. Pete Kember, who co-wrote Spacemen 3’s music with Pierce, until their last album, where either one of them had a side to themselves for their own works, which were recorded in separate studios, illustrating the rift between the pair and foreshadowing Spacemen 3’s demise. “I’ve heard some of the new stuff,” he says about his former collaborators’ music. “The stuff that I have heard just kind of sounded like it hadn’t moved far from what we were doing in Spacemen 3. I think what we’re doing now is so radically different. I know the roots were in Spacemen 3, but it’s so radically different from everybody else is at, within that. I also feel it’s a bit of a shame that people feel that they have to buy every kind of splinter of Spacemen 3, good or bad. Especially with the kind of cynical marketing of Spacemen 3, at the moment, where people are being asked to buy different art work and different colored vinyls. I just think it’s kind of cynical, taking the piss out of fans, but I’ve got no control over that.”

Pierce is very conscious of his cultish fan base, which often buys up Spiritualized’s every release since their music would be hard to hear otherwise, beyond US college radio. Besides commercial radio’s problem with drug references and certain vocabulary in Spiritualized’s songs, there’s also an inherent quality of its songs that beg for album-oriented context. The tracks are placed in a certain order and practically melt into each other, setting the listener up for a powerful range of emotions, and some songs last as long as 16 minutes. Pierce is not out to concede his music in order to sell million-selling albums to the pop radio audience. “It’s not really made for radio,” says Pierce about Spiritualized’s music, “and we pretty much refuse to compromise the music for radio and do edits. We’re now refusing to do singles in the sort of contemporary sense. I don’t want to do that kind of thing.”

Staying true to the music also means staying true to Spiritualized’s fan base, and, over the years, fans have been offered a lot of original goodies to get their hands on. There was the previously mentioned, mail-order only live CD, Fucked Up Inside, a performance recorded at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles, on Nov. 21, 1992, after the release of Lazer Guided Melodies. It presented the band at an interesting crossroads, featuring songs that would later show up on Pure Phase, as well as a version of the ever-coveted Spacemen 3 classic “Walking With Jesus.” The embossed, foil artwork on the cardboard sleeve was a nice bonus, and characterized Pierce’s attention to packaging. This was later up-staged by the glow-in-the dark alternative package of Pure Phase, limited to 40,000 worldwide. “I just started getting tired of those jewel boxes that everybody knew had faults within them,” says Pierce about the inspiration behind his ideas for unique packaging. “Everybody complains about the same things, all the time, about them, but nobody ever does anything to change them.”

Pierce’s current foray into original CD packaging is a pill box containing 12 three-inch CDs, which each contain one track from Ladies and Gentlemen, a play on , and a step further beyond, the packaging of the current album, which is presented as a prescription drug rather than a traditional record. “We put every track onto a different CD, so it’s a 12-CD pack,” says Pierce. “I think I’m going to try to make some more of those available because, initially, they didn’t really get out of the industry. They all went to retailers or shop owners, or people who could get them at cost price.** They just didn’t make enough of the things, and I kept trying to persuade them to make more because people would want them. We’re going to try to make more available, mainly to people that write back on the business reply card that was given with the album. We’ve always made records available to those people that write back on those things.”

Though he senses a demand for the fancy package, even though it is impractical as a listening experience, Pierce expects his fans will pay the price to have a copy of the album in such a unique format. “They are kind of expensive. They’re expensive for us to make. I think they cost about $70 in America, just to make the things, but I wanted to do it, if nothing else just as a design thing because it doesn’t really work as a musical thing at all in that the album was put together as an album. It isn’t a collection of 12 tracks, so I can’t really think of why anybody would play the limited edition.”

So, will Spiritualized ever grow beyond its devoted cult following and attract the interests of the MTV kids? “Somebody just asked if we ever thought we were going to go mainstream,” replies Pierce, “and I just said, ‘There’s going to have to be a whole lot of change in the mainstream if that happens, because we ain’t going to change.’ We’re not going to compromise what we do to our audience, and, I think, gradually, people are coming round to being more acceptive of different styles of music. People aren’t just into dance music anymore or into one style of music. People can listen to drum and bass and Hendrix and Sam & Dave and Acetone and Stereolab and Beastie Boys and Spiritualized. It’s not such a weird thing.”

—

*As a matter of fact, the deluxe version of last year’s reissue of Ladies and Gentlemen includes an array of studio outtakes across two extra CDs that some might feel redundant.

**Full disclosure: I actually got mine free from the label after doing this interview, though I did have to buy my own ticket for the NYC show on Spiritualized’s tour for this album.

(Copyright 2010 by Hans Morgenstern. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.)

July 29, 2010

With Spiritualized about to make a big appearance in New York to perform their 1997 masterpiece Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space in its entirety, with a full orchestra and choir, I thought it would be high time to share an interview I conducted with the mastermind behind Spiz, Jason Pierce, a.k.a. J. Spaceman. The– what should be– historic concert is scheduled for Friday, July 30, and thanks to “Spin Magazine”, you can watch it live on-line via Facebook. Accept their RSVP to make sure you do not miss it.

Now, on to my story, which first appeared in edited form in “Goldmine Magazine” in October of 1997*, with a then up-to-date and comprehensive US and UK discography of both the band’s CD and vinyl releases. Those were the days of print pages to spare! Though it was painstaking work to gather those catalog numbers and formats organized in chronological order, I shan’t share those here, unless several fans request it, as it is quite dated information and poses a pain to re-format for the web.

Without further, ado, here is an extended version of the profile I wrote back in the day, revised by yours truly, the author himself. It’s long, so I’m breaking it up into a 2-part series of posts, as I broke up my archival Tony Levin interview, also first published by “Goldmine”…

As the main mind behind the elaborate and haunting music of Spiritualized, Jason Pierce has often had to dodge tags of the tortured artiste and shoot down misconceptions as a perfectionist. “I like doing it,” Pierce bluntly states from the New York offices of his US label, Arista. The music of melancholic strings, sighing vocals, shimmering guitars, weightless drums and ambient synthesizers, coupled with lyrics of desire, transcendence, despair and rapture is all in good fun for Pierce, who wants to push music’s boundaries over the edge and find beauty beyond chaos.

The music that the Spiritualized name has come to define, through the 7-year course of four LPs and a multitude of EPs, can sometimes be wonderfully harmonic and other times jarringly dissonant, but, to Pierce, it all reaches its purpose, otherwise he would not bother having it realized. Pierce’s explorations of the harmonic spectrum have often left fans in tears at performances and critics blabbering superlatives. Pierce just smiles with interested content that his little trick worked. “I have a lot of fun doing it,” Pierce affirms. “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t like it. People say I took two years out of my life making this record, but that’s not so. It’s two years in my life.”

The new album, entitled Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, indeed took two years to follow-up the last record, Pure Phase, which, discounting the live, mail-order-only Fucked Up Inside, itself took three years to see the light of day after Spiritualized’s debut, Lazer Guided Melodies. Pierce composes all of Spiritualized’s music under the moniker J. Spaceman. His compatriots on the current aural journey that is Ladies and Gentlemen, include a core group of four, which consists of Pierce on vocals, guitars and keyboards, Sean Cook on bass and harmonica, and Damon Reece on drums and percussion. The fourth regular member of the band, Kate Radley, Pierce’s girlfriend up until the album’s release and organist/back-up vocalist of Spiritualized since 1992, “temporarily” left after the dissolution of her relationship with Pierce. She has since married Richard Ashcroft of the Verve, but has yet to return to Spiritualized, though Pierce says she is welcome to return when ready.

Adding a special flavor to the mix are a variety of guest artists. The Russian avant-garde string quartet lead by Alexander Balanescu returns after making an appearance on Pure Phase. New Orleans pianist Dr. John adds vocals and lends his keyboard wizardry to several tracks. Not to mention, the London Community Gospel Choir, which fill up the record with a soulful sound. Then there are a variety of horn players adding another dimension to the songs.

Considering this eclectic mix of instrumentation and players, it is no wonder Pierce does not believe he fits the perfectionist label. “I don’t think I am a perfectionist, and, if I am, it’s definitely not in the recording stage,” he explains, pointing out that the aforementioned mix of elements could never easily be directed to reach a preconceived musical ideal. “Most of the album is first take stuff. It’s not labored over. It’s no like, ‘Hey, that would be better if we changed the fuzzy sound a little.’ A lot of the drums are recorded before we even get the mics set-up to record them well. The immediate take tends to be the best take, no matter how many times we try and do it better or cleaner or whatever. We never get there again. Once we’ve recorded something special on those tapes, then you have to do it justice.”

It is once he has everything on tape when Pierce admits to having some sort of quality that might be understood as perfectionism. “You can’t mix them in any other way than the right way,” he continues, “and I guess that’s what takes time– trying to retain the original feeling that went into it, which, obviously, gets harder to do the further you get away from that, in time, so, two years later, trying to remember what was exciting about this stuff gets kind of difficult to do, but it’s important to get that back into it, otherwise you end up with a record that sounds like it was recorded two years ago and mixed two years later. I don’t think this one does. I don’t think any of our records do.”

Though his mixing can be very exacting**, Pierce explains that his desire to make his music sound transcendent does not fit into the popular definition of perfectionism. It’s more of an exploration of some hidden truth within the music that even he does not understand. “I’m very ambitious, musically,” he says. “I think, if you aim really high, even if you don’t get to the height you aim for, you still get way, way higher than you thought you were able.” It’s the mystery of the beauty that makes him seek, not what he thinks would be the “perfect” song.

As for the opening title track of the album, Pierce does not care to explain why a subtly placed beep among an electronically muffled violin that melts into the sound of a harmonica can chime along with the quavering sound of a bombastic guitar chord to move someone to empathize with the protagonist’s words of love and devotion, which are presented in four different lines of lyrics, sung by four differently modified voices, layered atop each other and delivered simultaneously. But, when listening to the title track of Ladies and Gentlemen one realizes the whole thing works. Even to Pierce, the creator of the above mentioned song, the mixture of elements is a mystery. “They just work, don’t they? It’s just integral, isn’t it? But I don’t think music is anymore important than the lyrics or the other way around. I don’t really know how that works,” he says. “It just does. I guess it has to do with the sort of intangible thing about recording, or writing of a song.”

Sometimes Pierce’s explorations lead him down subconscious familiar roads. The strings on “Broken Heart” seem to recall a relatively obscure track by Brain Eno, “Three variations on the Canon in D by Johann Pachelbel,” which Eno tagged to the end of his 1975 albumDiscreet Music, an early album of ambient music. Pierce admits that someone else pointed that out to him, though he had not heard it, but had grown interested in obtaining a copy of the album. Though, Pierce admits he goes out of his way to keep his music sounding original. “If we start to get stuff within our recording that starts to sound like other people’s music, we abandon it,” he says. “I’m not interested in just saying stuff that’s been said before. I’m more into the idea of music being evolutionary. I’m not into music that dilutes the original ideas, which a lot of music, and especially a lot of music in England, tends to be about. They’re using someone else’s blueprint, whether it’s Nirvana or the Beatles or David Bowie, and then just diluting the source. I’d rather go back to the source.”

Despite his efforts, Pierce still finds it difficult to completely extinguish his influences from the Spiritualized sound. “We’ve arrived at places that other people have arrived at, but as a kind of convergence, rather than robbery. I’ve found, since ‘Electric Mainline,’ that Don Cherry has got a track called ‘Brown Rice,’ and there’s a track on one of the Cluster albums (the album with the kind of yellow rainbow with the stars around it) that sounds just like ‘Electric Mainline,’ but these weren’t starting points for us. They were just something we arrived at, and, I guess, with everybody using the same musical scales, you’re always going to end up hitting some of the same notes, in the same order.”

Like a lot of the more daring musicians that came before him, like Eno, Pierce uses unusual sources of inspiration that lead him to his finalized songs. This is how he explains the conception of “200 Bars,” the finale of Lazer Guided Melodies: “I wanted to get that kind of feeling of when you’re given anesthetics in a hospital, and they do the count down, and, by the time they get to 10 you’re meant to be completely out of it, and I kind of like the idea of making that kind of stuff, within ‘200 Bars,’ anyway, that you could get to 200 and still be with it.”

This brings up the question of the possible role drugs play in Pierce’s music. Ever since his early days in the seminal eighties space-rock group Spacemen 3, drugs have been a reference point for Pierce. One sonic concept for Spacemen 3 came from the idea to create the sound one might hear before passing out, similar to “200 Bars.” Then there are titles like Taking Drugs (To Make Music To Take Drugs To), a compilation of Spacemen 3 demos. But before the question can be finished about the influence of drugs on Pierce’s musical ideas, he interrupts saying, “No, no. I don’t think drugs play any role, actually. The thing I keep saying is, the only way to prove that, is if you do a random control trial where you get 200 non-creative people, and you give a hundred of them drugs and a hundred of them placebos, and see who comes out with the most creative stuff, and I would imagine you’d find no kind of extra creativity in the drug side of the experiment.”

As far as drugs in his personal and recreational life, Pierce feels it would be an irrelevant question. The truth, or the reality, might destroy a myth, perpetuated by his lyrics, which would, ultimately, weaken the power behind the music. Take a line from “Come Together”: “Little Jason/fucked up boy/who dulled the pain/but killed the joy.” Then, on “I Think I’m In Love,” Pierce sings, “Love in the middle of an afternoon/Just me and my spike in my arm and my spoon.”

Pierce says that knowing more about the personal lives of the musicians that have moved him in his life has not brought any better appreciation of their music to him. “I think it comes through in those kinds of musics,” he says. “It comes through whether it’s the Stooges or Stravinsky or Hendrix or Captain Beefheart, or whatever. It’s all honest to those people, and you don’t need to hear the stories behind the music. You don’t need to hear about where those people were or what they were doing. You hear it within their music, anyway.”

**Pure Phase was actually mixed twice, with the separate mixes laid atop each other, in synchronization, creating the sound of two copies of the album playing simultaneously. Pierce called it a “nightmare” to synch.

(Copyright 2010 by Hans Morgenstern. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.)